(Moscow) Russia on Friday threatened the West with “direct confrontation” because of the “intensification” of American military drone flights in the Black Sea, off the coast of Ukraine, a few days after the first threats targeting Washington following a strike in annexed Crimea.
Moscow considers that the assistance provided to Kyiv in terms of weapons, intelligence collection and identification of targets on Russian territory has made the United States and its allies parties to the conflict in Ukraine, which the Kremlin has exacerbated in February 2022 by launching its forces to attack its neighbor.
US drone flights in the Black Sea “increase the likelihood of incidents in the airspace with aircraft of the Russian Aerospace Forces, which increases the risk of a direct confrontation between the Alliance and the Russian Federation,” he said. denounced the Russian Ministry of Defense in a press release.
“NATO countries would be responsible for this,” he warned, adding that Defense Minister Andrei Belousov had ordered the General Staff “to take measures to quickly respond to provocations.” .
Because, according to the Russian ministry, American drones are used “for reconnaissance and target designation for precision weapons supplied to the Ukrainian armed forces” by the West.
After having refused for a long time, for fear of provoking an escalation, Americans and Europeans have begun to authorize in recent weeks, under conditions, strikes with Western precision weapons on Russian territory to destroy sites and systems used to bomb Ukraine.
Russia had already threatened the United States with reprisals on June 24, accusing them of “killing Russian children,” the day after a strike in Crimea, a Ukrainian peninsula bordered by the Black Sea and annexed by Moscow in 2014. attack left four dead, including two children, and more than 150 injured by debris from a missile shot down over a “coastal area,” according to Moscow.
Because according to the Kremlin, long-range ATACMS missile strikes cannot be carried out by Ukraine alone, as these require specialists, technologies and intelligence collected by the Americans.
In Washington, the Pentagon limited itself to saying on Monday that Ukraine “makes its own decisions.”
Already at the beginning of June, citing retaliation, Russian President Vladimir Putin had threatened to deliver equivalent weapons to enemies of the West to attack their interests in other regions of the world.
And if the Russian fleet has numerical superiority in the Black Sea, it has lost numerous ships for more than two years, targeted by naval drone attacks successfully launched by Kyiv.
Thanks to these strikes, the Ukrainian army repelled Russian warships and established a maritime corridor in the area to export its grain. It is now also trying to strike the important military base in Crimea, the rear base of the Russian war effort.
Faced with the Ukrainian strikes, the authorities installed by Moscow in Sevastopol, headquarters of the Russian Black Sea fleet, on Thursday asked each resident to now carry a tourniquet, a medical instrument used to stop hemorrhages.
Ukraine also regularly attacks Russian energy sites using drones, in retaliation for the bombings which devastated Ukrainian infrastructure, forcing Kyiv to ration electricity throughout the country.
During the night from Thursday to Friday, an oil depot in the Tambov region, several hundred kilometers from the border, was attacked by a Ukrainian explosive drone, according to regional governor Maxime Egorov, causing a fire which was then extinct.
The Russian Defense Ministry, for its part, claimed to have “intercepted” 25 Ukrainian drones overnight over Russian territory.
High-intensity fighting also continues on a large part of the front which extends over approximately 1000 km. Particularly in the northeast and east.
For months, the Russian army has had the initiative. On May 10, it launched a new offensive in the northeast, in the Kharkiv region, facing a Ukrainian army lacking men and ammunition.
But according to Kyiv, the Ukrainian forces are in a better position, now that Western aid, blocked for months, is reaching the troops deployed on the front.
“The ammunition consumption ratio was 1 to 7 (in favor of the Russian army, editor’s note), today it is 1 to 3,” a source within the Russian Army told AFP on Friday. the Ukrainian General Staff.
A new mobilization must also replenish the Ukrainian ranks.
